I do not presently own BootitBare Metal, however I do not know if it would work for me. I have W7 on a 64 bit machine. I would like to be able to install XP & 98 or other operating systems on separate partitions and boot from them. However my W7 was originally configured to boot with a raid driver, but I cannot seem to figure out or get the right raid drivers for xp and 98 and get them to boot without resorting to Virtual Box or Vmware and I do not have a floppy drive. Note: I did finally find out that if I changed the bios from raid to IDE, then I could install XP. However, I don't want to be switching the raid back and forth or continually changing the bios (Note: I do not use raid). I have an external esata connection to an antec system, so I can plop another hard drive in it and play with it. Xp works fine in Vmware but I use some applications that require too much memory and I would rather use them direct if I can fix the problem.

Any help for this? Does BootIt Bare Metal work as good as Acronis 2010? Must it be installed to create a disk image or can you use it from the disk? And do you have any problems of operating systems overwriting the boot partition?

You are not using a RAID driver, you are actually using an AHCI
driver.

You will have to slipstream the AHCI drivers into your XP CD or get a
floppy drive to load the drivers during setup. AHCI post dates Win 98
and doubt that drivers are available. TBH, you'd be better off using
such an old OS in a Virtual Machine.

From what I have read, the performance to be gained from AHCI is
marginal. It is easy to revert an existing Win 7 to IDE, change your
BIOS to IDE and install XP and 98 without any driver hassles.

Do not mention Acronis and BIBM in the same breath LOL. BIBM is the
best, period. Personally, I have BIBM installed and boot Win 7 x64,
Vista x64, WinXP, and four Linux distros all from primary partitions.
I always install BIBM on my PCs.

Some OSs do overwrite BIBM (most windows and OpenSuSE does it) but it
takes a second to fix by reinstalling BIBM, all settings are
preserved.
--

Cheers

DrT
______________________________
We may not be able to prevent the stormy times in
our lives; but we can always choose to dance
in the puddles (Jewish proverb).

Just one further note, if you have a motherboard that works fine with Win7 you may not be able to install Win98 or even Win2000 as they will probably not have drivers that will allow them to install. I ran into that problem and the oldest OS I was able to install was WinXP. The rest I run in a VM.

On Sun, 19 Aug 2012 13:11:29 PDT, just as I was about to take a herb,
normfowler disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>Just one further note, if you have a motherboard that works fine with Win7 you may not be able to install Win98 or even Win2000 as they will probably not have drivers that will allow them to install. I ran into that problem and the oldest OS I was able to install was WinXP. The rest I run in a VM.
>
>Norm
>

This is not true. All one has to do is run the SATA chipset in IDE
mode (changed in the BIOS). AHCI mode is over rated.
--

Cheers

DrT
______________________________
We may not be able to prevent the stormy times in
our lives; but we can always choose to dance
in the puddles (Jewish proverb).

DrTeeth wrote:> This is not true. All one has to do is run the SATA chipset in IDE> mode (changed in the BIOS). AHCI mode is over rated.

There can be more to it than that. I've worked on several newer systems with older versions of Windows and they generally don't work well. It usually requires IDE Mode (and probably forcing compatibility mode), limiting the RAM size, a specific location on the drive, etc. Then, there are usually not drivers for any of the onboard devices so you end up with a system that does run but uses standard VGA and has no device support.

Running in a VM is what I recommend unless you actually have an older system that supports the older OS.

I appreciate both of your comments. Perhaps it would be better for me to purchase BIBM and use it to boot multiple copies of W7, W8, and Other Linux OS's. I do use VM Player and Virtual Box. VM Player is the easiest to use for converted OS images, but Virtual Box is a little more configuerable if you have the disk. Both of them however use a little too much memory and Norton constantly tells me they are using up one or more of my cores . I have been playing with changing W7 and W8 services to reduce their memory usage (changing the display resolution to help a little). I have a few old business programs that will only work on xp and some old W95 & 98 games. They will work in XP on VM Player or Virtual Box. Some programs seem to only work in a window on VMWare but on Virtual Box you can make it expand to fill the whole screen (I have a 24" screen). I've considered installing those on a separate partition with little or no firewall or Virus program if I could shield the other partitions and shut down the internet.

Both of you mentioned the AHCI mode, but I believe my Bios gives you the option to put it as IDE, AHCI, or RAID. If I change the bios to AHCI, my W7 (64) won't boot. I have a number of W7 images. Is there a way to convert them without reinstalling W7 from scratch? My other option which I tried was to temporarily change the bios to IDE for XP, install the raid drivers (which I'm not absolutely sure was the right one) and change it back to raid. However, that didn't work.